


love bites so deep

by wintervoice



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, DarkPilot, Established Relationship, Friends to Enemies to Lovers, M/M, knightpilot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:34:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21656077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintervoice/pseuds/wintervoice
Summary: Forgiveness is a long, winding road. Kylo Ren has no good intentions with which to pave it.But perhaps Ben Solo does.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 9
Kudos: 56





	love bites so deep

Poe comes to see him on day two of his imprisonment. 

He expects yelling. Or anger, at the very least, but it’s neither of those things. Instead, he feels a dark gaze linger on his form, emotions unreadable. A little twitch tickles at the base of his skull. There’s an urge to reach with his mind to suss out what the other man is feeling, why he insists on standing there with a practiced focus that only comes from military training, but he refuses to open his eyes for fear that he will begin struggling against the cuffs that suppress a Force user’s power. 

They were specifically designed, it seems, by a very optimistic Resistance member. As was the cell he occupies, with bars that _fizz-pop_ with the same intensity as his saber, which has been destroyed. They have waited a long time to bring Kylo Ren to heel. If not for the chains and the unwavering gaze of their very best pilot, he would have been a little flattered. 

Ren stays firmly rooted in place, eyes closed under the guise of meditation. His legs are crossed, hands on knees, like a good little padawan trapped in a trance of focus and power, and misses the cold confinement of his mask. There’s an ocean of carnage and absence between them and the tables have viciously turned. He refuses to give him the satisfaction of gloating, though he supposes the accommodations of rebels are far better than those of the Order. He might have shuddered to think of what would become of him had he been dragged aboard a Star Destroyer, but he already knows. 

So does Poe. 

The dry air of the brig tickles at his nose but he refuses to reach out to scratch. It’s positively burning by the time he finally hears boots squeak against duracrete as he turns away. 

A breath escapes his lungs in a sharp whoosh. He falls back against the too-small cot -- a gift from General Organa, who cannot bear the thought of him curled up against the floor -- and lifts bound hands to wipe at the perspiration on his forehead. The digital screen that displays the time and day informs him the encounter lasted only minutes, and yet he’s exhausted. He tells himself it’s the weariness of confinement when he rolls over, shoving an arm beneath his head, and curls inward on himself in an attempt to sleep. 

“They want to kill him.”

Poe is sitting in the solitude of General Organa’s private office. It’s more of a closet, really, shoved between the command center and a supply room, just big enough to hold a table and two chairs. He watches her carefully and says nothing. But he flinches at the word _kill_. 

“That’s not who we are.” She says it because she’s a good woman. It has nothing to do with the fact that he’s her son. Had it been any other First Order officer, she would have said the same thing, he’s sure. “That’s not what we do.”

He scrubs a hand across his face. “No, it’s not.”

She lays a hand against the wall as if she can feel him from all the way across the base. The pad of her thumb rubs a little circle against the stone (Poe would later find, when he watched the holo logs back, that Kylo Ren murmured and leaned into this sensation in his sleep). Her entire body heaves with the force of her anguished sigh. 

“He’ll have to be useful,” she doesn’t say his name, thank the stars. He isn’t sure he can keep from crying if he hears his name. “They’ll get their way if he’s not.”

There’s no order, but Leia Organa has never needed words to issue commands. She carries herself with a unique air that comes from a prestigious, important bloodline. No one can forget that she is both princess and general. 

Poe nods and leaves her to his grief, offering only a courteous nod on his way out of the room. He has enough of his own to drown in and no space in which to do it, so he heads back to the brig and stares at the gray-green surveillance holos until his eyes go fuzzy. 

“I would think,” Ren finally speaks on his fourth visit, words measured as if he’s been rehearsing what he should say for hours. He has, but that’s not the point. “The Resistance would have greater use for you than serving as a prison guard.”

Poe reclines against the wall outside the cell, tilting his head back just a little. There’s a tray of what Ren supposes counts as food on a little rolly table next to his hip. He has yet to turn off the blades that surround the bars so it sits, mocking him, smelling fake and crumbly. He hasn’t eaten in three days and his stomach betrays him with a little growl. 

“Yeah. Well.” He’s mocking him with the slow way in which he grinds out the words. “We’re actually _winning_ for once. We’re allowed to slow down a little. Change up our posts.”

He drops low to pluck the tray from the table. He picks up the only sweet thing on the tray, koyo fruit, eyes crinkling a little as if he can’t help the smile, and flicks a little toggle to his right. The bars _schoof_ as they are switched off. He takes a bite and then one more, all the while Ren’s eyes are narrowing. 

It’s all very familiar. Poe used to steal and eat half of his sweets when they were children. He’d always insist on scarfing down the last ice pop and gobbling up the last bit of chocolate if they happened to be sharing a candy bar. It’s a little more pointed now considering all that remains on the plate is a slice of bread and some sort of stew. 

“Figured you’d think we’re trying to poison you,” he says, sliding the tray under the little opening at the base of the cell and turning the bars back on. 

Ren sneers coldly and turns his back on Poe to face the wall instead. 

“Fine.” There’s a little ripple of frustration in his voice. “Starve, then. I’ll tell General Organa you’re still refusing meals.”

There’s a little flinch in his shoulders at that but he doesn’t move. It’s only after he hears the blast door to the brig hiss close that he finally untangles his legs and crosses the small space to retrieve the tray. 

The food is barely tolerable and sits heavy in his stomach when he’s done, but he eats every last bite. Even the bread, which crumbles and turns to a sort of paste on his tongue. He chases it down with water that tastes like minerals. 

When he’s finished, he holds up the empty tray toward the camera in the corner of the cell and says, “Happy?” 

**_A few words for the boy I love:_ **

**_It’s sweltering today and I’m thinking about when you_** **_told me you loved me for the first time under the Force tree. It was so hot and you were so beautiful, all sweaty in that way that makes your hair curl and flip out toward the front. You said it so fast, like you were afraid if you didn’t say it right then, you might never have the chance again._ **

**_I think that’s the happiest I’ve ever been._ **

**_At the end of all this, I hope we can go back there. I hope I can hear your voice and your little laugh when you tell me again. I love you. I love you. I love you._ **

**_I hope you know I love you too, even with the distance._ **

The cuffs come off on day fourteen. The muscles of his arms scream from misuse as he twirls his wrists, attempting to remember what it feels like to move freely. His power returns a few minutes later and he reaches out tentatively, an experiment to see which minds among the Resistance might be weak-willed enough to exploit. 

But somewhere across the base, General Organa is laying a hand on Commander Dameron’s shoulder with a wry little smile. She calls him _son_ and something inside of him, the part where Ben Solo still exists, snaps in two. It’s off-handed on her part, a little term of endearment for the man that reminds her so much of her dead husband, but the sharpness of it slices through Ren like a knife. 

He's still nursing the invisible wound when Poe arrives at midday. He waits until that breath of a moment when the tray is placed on the floor and the kyber streams are off, and he kicks it back. It slides a little too perfectly between the spaces in the metal bars, clatters first against his face and then the floor. 

Foodstuff splatters against Poe’s uniform and the wall. The sound of metal against duracrete is loud enough that the guard outside the blast door comes rushing in. She glances between the two men, notices Poe’s shock and Ren’s cruel expression and hastily flicks an alarm. It sounds somewhere in the distance and he holds his hands out, ready for the cuffs, when additional guards swarm the room. A strong knee connects with his middle and he lurches forward, brought to his knees before the commander. Ren grins up at him, monstrous and ugly, and he spits at his boots. 

Poe is still clutching his jaw when he stalks out of the brig. There’s a purple bruise already forming under the stubble on his chin thanks to the Force. Ren is hauled back up to his feet with a pained yelp, but he does not turn around.  
  


The war-weary general is at battle with the bereaved mother. He can see it in the way she traces the sharp mark from the corner of the tray along the soft part of his cheek. His nose is broken too. The hollows of his eyes are already starting to purple. A medic and med droid flutter about him before she storms out of the med bay. 

General Leia Organa is not capable of being within a hundred yards of Kylo Ren, and when she arrives in the brig, angered by the suffering of her golden boy, Kylo Ren is curled in the furthest corner of his cell because he is not capable of being within a hundred yards of her, either. When Poe watches the holo logs after his broken cartilage is set, he sees Ren’s breathing coming short and fast. Something invisible and inside of the Supreme Leader causes his entire body to tremble and he falls, falls, falls.

_Panic attack_ , Poe thinks, and it’s like a Force flash to their childhoods. Leia’s anger morphs into pity and then into empathy. She commands that the bars are turned off and rushes in, gathering her son, who is now twice her size, into her arms and mumbles half phrases about being okay and _breathe, just breathe_ and _you have to calm down, little angel_. 

He buries his face into the crook of her shoulder and sobs. Ben Solo is there, in the crying and the way he desperately clings to her, and the entire base is appalled when she folds herself onto the cot with him and they both drift off to sleep hours later.

Poe, however, is not surprised when he comes into the brig the next morning to find that she is still there. Her fingers are combing through his hair, her mouth pressed to the top of his head, and the man (he does not know who he is now, if he is Ben Solo or Kylo Ren) is shuddering in his slumber as if feverish. 

“General,” he winces because his jaw still hurts, but he’s also mesmerized. Those little twitches and sighs are achingly familiar because when Ben had reached to him for comfort once, long ago, after a nightmare or a particularly trying day in which he thought he saw shadows dancing in the corner of his vision, he’d held him in much the same way. 

She rises reluctantly, made worse by a whimper that is much too fragile for Kylo Ren and turns to leave the cell. “Blankets,” she says once they’re on their way out of the brig. “He needs blankets and a pillow, at the very least.”

Poe nods, searching her features just as she searches his, and he doesn’t need ancient, mystical powers of the Skywalker bloodline to know what she is asking with that pointed gaze. 

She asks the question anyway. He looks away, suddenly engrossed in the patterned webbing of the hallway wall. It’s hard to lie to a commanding officer and look them in the eye. 

“No,” he says. “I don’t lo--” He catches himself on a word that is not allowed. “I stopped when he cut my mind to pieces searching for the coordinates to Luke Skywalker.” 

“Of course,” Leia smiles, just a little. There’s a pain to it that echoes back to mirror his own. “I stopped when he killed Han. Lucky us.”

**_A few words for the boy I love:_ **

**_I look up at the sky and think of you. You’re in the clouds and the bright, blue spaces between. I reach up to the expanse of it with bony, trembling hands and wonder if you can feel my touch across the galaxy. I like to think so even if I know it’s impossible. Maybe if you were strong with the Force, like me. Maybe then I could make you understand just how much I love you._ **

**_Master Luke thinks my affection for you is a little frightening. He says I should be careful with my love because it’s the sort that devours. I don’t know if he’s right. You’ll have to tell me when I see you again._ **

Poe returns to the cell three times a day, always with a tray in hand. He makes a show of taking small bites of everything before shoving it into the cell, sighing as if this is some sort of great favor, and Ren is impressed that he can meet his gaze.

He is less impressed when he decides to linger afterward, on day twenty-six. When he brings two trays. When he slides down the wall until he’s sitting, legs outstretched dangerously close to the kyber streams, and begins picking at his own food as if they can casually share a meal when he is encumbered with prison bars and cuffs. 

“What are you doing?” He’s standing, head ducked to accommodate the low ceilings of the cell, half-turned toward the food. 

Poe shrugs. His jaw is a mess of yellow and green veins now. “Mess hall is too crowded.” 

Once upon a time, Ben Solo had been just a boy, all lanky and lean and slow to smile, and he had loved him. 

They had talked about things like _forever_ before the war and the destruction of the Jedi temple, back when they were kids who swapped secrets and kisses beneath the branches of the Force tree in Poe’s backyard, fed each other slices of koyo fruit, and built their lives around a future where they were two halves of one whole: Poe would go into the navy. Ben would attend some higher form of education, maybe apprentice under his mother, and then they would follow each other around the galaxy. 

It’s there still, the love, in the way he can’t stop rubbing at his jaw even when his entire face aches in protest. It’s in the way he spends more time in the brig or in the observation room than strictly necessary, especially once the prisoner does more than sneer in his general direction (they even _talk_ sometimes, and it’s somehow worse and better all at once). It’s in the way he can’t stop hoping, even when he wakes in the middle of the night in tears, angry and broken, thrown from a nightmare where Kylo Ren sifts through his mind with invisible fingers as sharp as blades.

**_Ben -_ **

**_Can you believe it? Flimsi. Actual, real flimsi. I thought it was a luxury reserved strictly for Organa-Solos. I won’t tell you how much it cost. You’ll try to transfer credits and I’ll refuse and then we’ll bicker and I won’t be able to kiss you to convince you I’m right._ **

**_Kriff, my handwriting is horrible. Yours is nicer._ **

**_Your way with words is nicer too. Sometimes I have to reread your letters a couple times because I’m all caught up in the way you write. It’s like poetry or something. I don’t know how to talk like that. It’s pretty. It’s...yeah. It’s pretty. I like it._ **

**_My next leave is at the end of the month. Can you come see me? Or I can fly out to see you, Jedi protocol be damned._ **

**_I love you, too._ **

**_P.S. Answer my comms, dummy. I miss you._ **

The cuffs are removed again on day thirty-two under orders of Commander Dameron. The guard that removes them makes sure to inform Kylo Ren of this when they fall free of his wrists. She’s a little skittish, even when he does nothing but flex his fingers and stare at the camera in the corner of the cell. He can feel _Commander Dameron_ watching and, for just a moment, he almost smiles.

On day forty-seven, he is permitted to leave the cell. He enters the war room and every being, humanoid or not, holds their breath. He’s told he’s to disclose any information he may have on the First Order. 

He lingers at the edge of the room, guards flanking each side, and _makes faces_ , of all things, as he talks. He grimaces and chews on his cheek and rolls his eyes. It’s distracting. Poe can’t stop looking at him, even when the other officers are questioning his intel in a way that is a little too brave.

Ren recites everything in a very clinical way, glossing over logistics of how they move and focusing instead on the way in which they do it. He says that the First Order is quick and efficient, with spies in every reach of the galaxy, and that if they have any hope of stopping them, they should focus on offensive strategies rather than defensive. 

“You cannot defeat an enemy if you are always running,” he adds at the end, and Poe bristles a little at the way his eyes settle on him as he says it. 

**_A few words for the boy I love:_ **

It says it just like that, across the top of the page, in Ben Solo’s elegant scrawl, with a few blots of ink next to _love_. The calligraphy pen always struggled under the strong press of his grip. His letters -- stupid, out of practice, impractical handwritten letters that Poe adored -- always started that way.

**_It’s half past one in the morning and I am thinking that I have never been soft. I guess this realization should alarm me more than it does, but I look at the galaxy and think I am lucky for it. It wasn’t made for soft people._ **

**_I think it’s good that I hate more than I love. Easier. I’ve never loved much of anything and it helps when training is long and rigorous and I remember it’s been six months since I’ve seen my dad._ **

**_Except for you, of course. I’ve always loved you. You know all about my heart and how you are the only thing inside of it most days._ **

Poe folds up the note and puts it back into the little metal box. The letter on top, the very last one, had arrived a week after the destruction of the Jedi temple and he’d been told his first love -- only love, really -- was lost in the wreckage. He can’t bring himself to read that one, even now. 

There are dozens more beneath it, each one creased from folding and unfolding, reading and rereading, trying to decipher in the many years that had passed what he could have done differently. If there had been a way to save Ben Solo. 

He stares at the pile for a long while, fanning them out again, and gathers them up into his palms. He carries them across the base and into the brig. 

“Guess what I found.”

Ren releases a little huff, eyes trained to toes of his socks as he completes another round of sit-ups. There’s little to occupy his time outside of meditation and exercise. He’s on day-- he glances at the display outside the cell -- fifty-five of his confinement and he’s starting to lose his mind. He half wonders if he’s imagining Poe there considering there are no trays of food in his hands and it’s not yet a regulated meal time. 

Instead, he’s holding faded parcels of flimsi, each tied with little bits of green string. 

Ren stills halfway up, catching himself on his elbows. His expression pinches. 

He shuffles them a little, thumbing through the pile with care. “I always said they were like poetry.”

“Yes,” he tilts back again, tightening the muscles in his core to complete another bend and reach to touch his knees. His tongue feels dry. “It was bad poetry if I recall.” 

"It was bad." Poe agrees. There's a gentleness in his voice that makes the hollow of Ren's chest, the spot just behind his sternum, twinge. "But you wrote it for me.”

Poe is almost an honor guard by day sixty. He escorts him to briefings and to his cell and the mess hall and back again. He still doesn’t eat among the others, even with the limited freedom he’s allowed. Ren says no one wants to see the _Jedi Killer_ scarfing down toast and juice at breakfast. Poe insists no one actually calls him that. Ren lists the names of five people who have thought of him as such on that day alone and he’s halfway through a sixth before Poe cuts him off.

“ _Okay_. I get it.”

When they’re walking back to his cell, carrying their lunch trays, he’s thinking of the letters again and floppy-haired Ben Solo, who had breathed against his neck and stuttered out _I love you_ that last night before he’d gone away to train as a padawan. He’s reminiscing on the way their bodies had contrasted even then. He was large and pale. Poe had been smaller, golden. There was a constellation of freckles across his chest and down his stomach that Poe had traced with his mouth, not knowing it would be the last time he would be permitted to do so. 

This time it’s Ren that breaks the silence.

“You are thinking very loudly,” he announces, and he nearly stumbles when Poe turns on him, catching him off guard, and glares with the blazing ferocity of twin suns at high noon on Tattooine. 

“Stay the fuck out of my head.”

The entire hallway waits with bated breath to see what Kylo Ren will do. He and the commander are standing toe to toe and there are no shackles to keep his power in check. He could easily break a bone or toss him aside with the flick of a wrist. The rumors say he can stop a man’s heart with just a look. Poe knows better. Or maybe he doesn’t, because his heart stopped beating over Ben Solo a long time ago. Still, he needs something to do with the conflicting torrent of betrayal and tenderness that rule his mind whenever he is near Kylo Ren, so he refuses to waver.

But nothing happens. They simply stand there, lost in time, until Ren lets go of his tray. It falls to the floor with a deafening _ker-thunk_. Everyone within thirty yards jumps, including Poe. 

He offers nothing but a little apathetic tilt of his head and steps over the mess, marching off toward his cell as if he’s a five year old that has been denied a holovid before bed. 

He probably thinks he’s proving some kind of point. Or it’s just another one of the many temper tantrums to which Poe had once been accustomed. Either way, he’s back to _meditating_ when Poe slides the dinner tray into the cell. It’s still untouched in the morning. 

**_A few words for the boy I love:_ **

Poe's hands are shaking when he finally reads the last letter. He has to take deep, steady breaths through his nose so the words will stop swimming together.

**_Something is eating away at me. It’s worse the longer we’re apart. Never in my life have I felt like this. It feels like shame and weakness, terror and indifference. It grows with each passing moon. It’s paralyzing. I feel crippled and out of control. I feel sick. Empty. Aching. What am I?_ **

**_All I can think about is how if you were here, you'd tell me it’s all going to be okay. You'd call me dummy and ruffle my hair in that way you do, just before you kiss me, but I had a dream last week that you and I met in another life. The world was rough and cold, streaked with war, and you didn’t know me. I kept screaming that I was still there, trapped outside of myself, and you kept saying you weren’t afraid. It felt so real that I was crying when I woke up, and I tried to will the Force from my body. I don’t want to live in a world where you can’t recognize me. The divine of ancient power is nothing compared to your hand in mine. I don’t want power. I only want you._ **

The next part is in all capitals, with a slash through it as if he regretted the letters as soon as he’d written them.

**_Please, Poe. I’m afraid._ **

Kylo Ren finds his mother in the belly of the base the first time he is allowed to roam freely. 

Well, not freely. It's only day seventy-four. There’s a single guard that flanks him, but they stand and wait outside of her little office when he enters. He falls to his knees and clutches at her robes. He’s breaking again, shattering at the seams, and something else is emerging from beneath the veneer of cold indifference that has replaced the mask. Something that looks a lot like Ben Solo when he lifts his head, eyes wet with tears, and presses her palm against his face. 

“Mom,” he’s sobbing again. It’s the ugly kind, all heaving shoulders and pained groans. “Mom, please…”

He doesn’t have to ask for exoneration. He never did. She named him after hope, after all, and she never lost it. 

On day eighty-six, he saves lives. 

He is not permitted a weapon, but when the First Order attacks and they are forced to flee, he angles himself between a group of pilots and soldiers, snarling and stopping blaster shots mid-air, redirecting them back to the enemy. Stormtroopers crumble with each dodged blow. Carnage unfolds and in the center of it all is Kylo Ren, protecting the very people who have kept him prisoner. 

Poe is, of course, among the fallen he is protecting, clutching a broken arm to his chest, but he thinks it must be a coincidence. 

He knows it’s not when he thanks him later on the transport that’s carrying them to another base. He passes him a piece of koyo fruit from the rations and the tops of his pale, freckled covered cheeks burn red when their fingers touch.

“You should be proud.” Poe thinks of how easy it would be to settle on the bench next to him. Maybe he could bump into his shoulder good-naturedly and pretend being near him doesn’t make his entire body burn. “You did a good thing today.”

He gives a curt shake of head. “Doesn’t matter.”

“It does.” 

Ren finally meets his gaze. Or rather, Ben Solo does. The distinction is in the way his eyes shine with emotion, in the fragile quiver of his chapped lower lip. They don’t say anything else.

He can’t look at him for three days after. 

There are shady corners of the universe even among the Resistance. Combined with the unprotected moments that are permitted now, on day one hundred and three of his imprisonment, he has encountered people whose lives he has wronged. _World killer,_ they call him. _War criminal. Murderer. Monster._ They take their revenge in the form of quick fists and hard kicks. 

Ben screams, an ear-piercing, guttural roar that shakes the entire base, as med droids attempt to hold him down so medics can attend to his fractured ribs and a dislocated right shoulder. He does not want treatment. This is expected. It is deserved.

It still _hurts_ , though. It’s made worse when Leia has to enter the med bay and demand he sit still or there will be permanent damage. He complies just long enough for broken bones to begin to mend and then offers a wave of his hand to send the droids and one poor medic smashing against the wall, much to her chagrin. 

His body is still throbbing with pain when Poe storms in ten minutes later. The whir of medical equipment fills the silence between them for a very long time.

Finally, Poe speaks and he’s almost snarling. Even his rage is beautiful. “Who did this?” 

“Stop,” he winces despite himself. Speaking opens up his split lip. “Let it go.”

“Why don’t you--” Poe grits his teeth. “You could have used the Force.” 

He is very quiet, stubbornness warring with pain, and he can’t look at him as he presses the little red button that releases morphine. There’s a new pain now in the way Poe looks at him that won’t be treated by the gentle flow of numbing meds, but he has to try. 

“Ben--”

“Don’t.”

Another press and the morphine makes his vision go spotty. 

It has never been a question of whether or not he is in love with Ben Solo. He’s loved him since they were kids running through the fields of Yavin IV and collapsing under the stifling sun. Longer, maybe, if the old legends about souls being bound by the Force are true. But he’s a twisted and mangled thing now, burning hot and ready to tear the object of his affection apart even when Poe presses him against the wall in the dimly lit hallway between the brig and the mess hall on day one hundred and five.

Ben’s mouth is still swollen. The tender skin breaks open again when Poe’s lips come crashing against his with bruising intensity. He hisses against the pain and blood rushes against Poe’s tongue.

It is not a kind kiss. It’s hard and bitter and angry, tinged with heartbreak, but Ben bends low to meet him a little too eagerly, fisting his hands into Poe’s jacket until he’s pulling away.

Ben is left breathless and wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. It comes away sticky and red. He squints into the darkness, searching for him among the shadows, and waits. 

He makes a grave mistake in his impatience: he reaches out through the Force and Poe’s mind reels, horrified, in return. His gaze is ruinous when he catches it again. He can’t stumble back in anticipation quickly enough. A fist collides with his face. 

It’s sharp enough that he looks up at him as if he’s seeing stars. His vision is glassy and distant, and Poe’s rage-fueled _I told you to stay out of my head_ is still ringing around them long after he’s left him lying there on the duracrete.

He knows love is soft smiles and curly hair and a scar the same shape as a quarter moon nestled in the cheek of a golden-skinned boy. But maybe it’s in the way his body crumbles in the middle of the battlefield, too, on day one hundred and fifty-seven. 

Maybe it’s the way he’d jumped in front of the flying fragments of weaponry a little too quickly to stop it mid-air, or the dark red staining the gray of his new robes. 

Maybe it’s in the tears that fall on his cheeks that are not his own. 

“Sorry,” he’s smiling around the mumbled words. What he means to say is _Sorry I’m a monster_ . What his expression conveys is _I love you_ , and maybe the blood he’s choking on is the same as both of those things.

He doesn't know. He can't see straight and there's a screaming pain in his middle every time he takes a breath. 

Still, it’s his first apology in ten years. A victory for the Light.

Poe only laughs a little, presses his forehead against his, and sits like that until a support shuttle arrives. Ben isn’t even dying, not really, and yet it feels that way when a tech insists that Poe let him go so they can load him up and take him away for treatment, because he never, ever wants to let him go. 

There’s a little moon in the Gordian Reach that’s green and blue and _hot_. 

Ben Solo sits in the low hanging limbs of the Force tree, one knee drawn up to his chest, and wipes beads of sweat from his forehead. He no longer needs to meditate to search for peace. It’s in the gentle breeze that serves as the only reprieve from the stifling heat and the little rustle of movement beneath his feet and the sudden _bah-bum_ of his heart that’s still there, on day…

He’s lost count. It’s blissful. 

Poe swings up onto the branch with him. Their shoulders bump and he smiles. A real, genuine smile that stretches his cheeks uncomfortably just to accommodate the breadth of his joy.

“What?” Poe says, mouth full of koyo fruit, and Ben has no verbal response. He simply leans forward for a kiss, which Poe is more than happy to reciprocate. 

They sit that way for a while, breathless and smiling among the branches of the Force tree, and it feels so familiar and surreal that he wonders if this is some sort of trick of the mind. He has to lean his forehead against Poe’s for a moment just to feel the solid presence of his body to remember it’s real. 

An emotion surges from his mind, so golden and bright it competes with the rays of the sun, and Ben doesn’t have to reach out to feel it. He can almost taste it on his tongue. It tastes like dispensation. It tastes like absolution. It tastes like...

Another kiss, this one deepened with a little sigh, and Ben realizes forgiveness tastes a lot like koyo fruit. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> title is from tiger teeth by walk the moon. i listened to it a lot while writing this. 
> 
> special thanks to eve (aka hopcbound), who read through this and encouraged me to finish it by saying, and i quote, "IT HAS TO END WITH THE TREE."


End file.
